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We are seeing plenty of new comments, and blog posts regarding who is building single-dealer platforms (SDPs), although there don’t seem to be many posts that take things back to basics and explain the actual reasons SDP’s are being built. For those of you looking for a brief, straightforward explanation, here you go:

When built by an experienced team, single-dealer platforms are a fast, low cost and low risk way to service highly differentiated client segments, delivering unique relationship pricing in commoditised vanilla flow products, and adding stickiness through enhanced compelling and more complex services.

There are no restrictions on what can be built on top of a single-dealer platform. Top players tend to build their platforms in-house, leveraging their huge internal core competences for strategic competitive advantage.

Other benefits to banks include:

Improved margins, through delivering unique per using relationship pricing

Interesting comment in today’s FX week (sorry password required) about the problems with some banks FX feeds… “Banks must improve their foreign exchange pricing and trading infrastructure or risk losing order flow, according to currency traders….”

My take on the article, is that some banks are still streaming the illusion of ‘robust’ deep liquidity to clients, when in reality, the liquidity is not deep, and will disappear after the first client ‘hits them’, additional clients are then unlikely to be filled, and due to slippage (the price has now moved) the trade is rejected – this does not make for a happy client!

There seems to be fairly little written about the successful marketing of an SDP but having been working with many customers who have been providing successful SDPs for a few years now it is becoming clear that as this area of the market grows and the technical and pricing hurdles are overcome, that having an integrated marketing plan for your SDP will become a more important element for overall success.

There are naturally many aspects to such a plan but one in particular came to prominence last week when I caught up with one of Caplin’s customers’ who built their emerging markets FX SDP 3 years ago. When we were originally architecting the system with them, they wanted to design a completely parallel deployment that could be used for demoing the service and for users to trial it all with dummy accounts.Continue reading →

On March 31, Deutsche Bank electronically traded and cleared an off-exchange interest-rate swap on behalf of a hedge fund client in what it termed “one seamless move.”

The development may mark the first time an over-the-counter interest-rate swap has been handled electronically from order to clearance, for an institutional buyer.

The trade was executed on Deutsche’s proprietary, single-dealer electronic trading platform, called Autobahn. The transaction was confirmed over Markit Wire, the confirmation-affirmation “matching” service of MarkitServ.

Very interesting article about the move toward foreign exchange markets becoming fully electronic. Comments from Deutsche Bank, UBS, Cit and HSBC. The article also comments about single-dealer platforms and internalization. Click here to view the full article on Euromoney.

Research by Greenwich Associates (released in March 2010) states that around the world, multi-bank electronic trading platforms captured about 40% of overall FX trading volume in 2008-2009 and single-bank platforms captured another 15%.

However, the two most authoritative sources of actual empirical data on FX activity, namely the Bank of England (BoE) and the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) seem to paint a very different picture!

Bank of England (BofE): Empirical data released by the Bank of England (Oct 2009), covering FX activity between reporting dealers and clients in London (the largest global FX market), shows that single dealer platforms (SDPs) accounted for 25% of all electronic FX volume, compared with only 13% of electronic volume done through multi-dealer platforms (MDPs).

(BoE):London daily eFX volumes by SDP and MDP (2009)

Bank of International Settlements (BIS): The most definitive empirical data on global FX volumes is produced every three years by the BIS in their Triennial survey. Data from the 2007 triennial survey shows a similar picture to the BoE data. Whilst eFX accounted for 34% of all global daily FX volumes, SDPs accounted for nearly 30% of all electronic FX volume, compared with only 21% done through MDPs, as shown below:

Electronic trading in foreign exchange continued to gain ground in a contracting market last year, overtaking the telephone as the primary channel for customer dealing, according to research by Greenwich Associates.

While total FX volumes declined six per cent from 2008 to 2009, e-trading volumes increased by seven per cent, suggesting that market participants continue to actively shift volumes to multi-bank and single dealer platforms from other channels.